Wind

James Arthur

it’s true sometimes I cannot

stop myself from spilling

the recycling

unpetalling apple blossoms raiding

a picnic

making off with napkins I’m nothing

until I happen

flipping an umbrella outside-in

throwing its owner

into a fumble

pelting the avenue with sleet or dust

at times downtown

riding over galleries of air

so full of high excitement howling

I borrow an old woman’s hat

and fling it into the road

arriving with news of the larkspur

and the bumblebee

at times embracing you so lightly

in ways you don’t even register

as touch

James Arthur is the author of Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

About James Arthur

Themes

Audio

Nature

About this Poem

“I wrote this poem in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, while staying in the A-frame that the Canadian poet Al Purdy and his wife Eurithe built, mostly out of salvaged lumber, on the edge of Roblin Lake. The lake itself isn’t very deep—Purdy called it ‘a backwater puddle’—but some days the wind was strong enough to create waves that splashed and broke against the stones at the water’s edge. At night, hearing wind gust over the A-frame’s roof, I could imagine the weather as a kind of invisible companion.”

—James Arthur

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Model-Train Display at Christmas in a Shopping Mall Food Court

These kids watching so intently
on every side of the display
must love the feeling of being gigantic:
of having a giant’s power
over this little world of snow, where buttons
lift and lower
the railway’s crossing gate, or switch the track,
or make the bent wire topped with a toy helicopter
turn and turn
like a sped-up sunflower. A steam engine
draws coal tender, passenger cars, and a gleaming caboose
out from the mountain tunnel,

James Arthur

2019

Hundred Acre Wood

Some of these stories are too sweet for me.

Winnie-the-Pooh is so innocent, his little songs leave me cold.

But I like this—your hand across my hand,

your head against my shoulder. Your first winter, I carried you

even along the margins of the highway,

strapped against my chest in a sling. You never can tell with bees,

says Pooh, who seems to believe that almost nothing can be told,

but I am your morose, restless father,

and you are four years old.

James Arthur

2018

Ode to an Encyclopedia

O hefty hardcover on the built-in shelf in my parents’ living room,
O authority stamped on linen paper, molted from your dust jacket,
Questing Beast of blue and gold, you were my companion

on beige afternoons that came slanting through the curtains
behind the rough upholstered chair. You knew how to trim a sail
and how the hornet builds a hive. You had a topographical map

James Arthur

2015

Poems

Wind

More by this poet

Model-Train Display at Christmas in a Shopping Mall Food Court

Hundred Acre Wood

Ode to an Encyclopedia

Poems

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Wind

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